"Except Paris is 7,000 kilometres away from where I am, in Guyane, or French Guiana, a department of France in South America, just north of the equator. The size of Portugal but with a population of only 300,000, French Guiana sends deputies to the Assemblee Nationale, votes for the French president and prices things in euros. Administratively, it is no different from Brittany, but this region is home to France's longest land border with Brazil and Europe's only space rocket launch site."
"Here, in this unlikely fragment of the EU in the Amazon, global crises converge into a paradox: a microcosm of humanity's failure to deal with the climate crisis and protect biodiversity, despite possessing all the data we need. From French Guiana's Atlantic coast, the European Space Agency (ESA) launches satellites capable of observing the heating of the planet, the destruction of its forests, the collapse of its ecosystems. But what they see most clearly is the gap between what we know and what we do."
A camp near the Petit-Saut archipelago contains soldiers, gendarmes, assault rifles, maps, and a humming generator beneath a canopy of branches and tarp. Petit-Saut comprises hundreds of forested islands and a watery ecosystem three times the size of Paris. French Guiana is a French department in South America with the size of Portugal and 300,000 people, integrated into French and EU institutions. The region hosts Europe's only space rocket launch site and the European Space Agency monitors planetary heating and forest loss from the coast. Illegal gold mining has caused an ecological crisis, poisoning citizens, and two decades and nearly €1bn of armed intervention have failed to stop it due to barriers like the Maroni river.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]